So what happens next? Hard lockdown, or muddle on through and hope?
Forget the rows about fine-tuning — the rule of six or closing pubs at 10pm. Policy will go one of two crude ways. We either keep shutting things down to keep people apart until infection rates drop. Or we keep most things open, put the economy and freedom first, ask that the public behave carefully, and hope that our medical system can cope and that the death rate does not rise too sharply.
It’s a grim choice.
Long after this is all over we will debate which route would have been best. Every option will do harm.
Lockdown will leave the country poorer, people out of work, restaurants bankrupt, life less fun to live — and it might only bring infection rates down for them to rise again. But the alternative may be a lethal gamble which collapses into an even more severe lockdown later on.
We may feel strongly in favour of different answers at different times in a single day. We see pictures from packed bars in Soho and complain about the risk. Then we hear about theatres going bust and lament what’s being lost to culture.
We can fear what’s happening in intensive care wards while hoping blog posts about T-cell immunity might turn out to contain some truth.
France and Spain warn us that infection rates are about to rise very fast here — that’s what the Government’s scientists say, too. Sweden and Italy are being used by those who think the responsible approach is to keep things open, while getting people to act with great caution.
But there’s no guarantee that their current luck will be sustained.
The easiest thing is to complain that we should be in a better place. Of course, we should be. The testing system is a total mess. Ministers promised quick solutions which turned out to be fake.
Eat Out to Help Out packed restaurants which may now be made to shut. We lack a Prime Minister with a plan, leading the nation through the crisis, reassuring us, urging us and warning us. But in the immediate days ahead complaining like this won’t make much difference.
Lots of other cities quite like ours had different leaders with slightly different policies, but we are all heading the same way: New York, Madrid and Paris are going through similar crises.
So what do we think should happen?
The Evening Standard stands for an open, active, creative London. Our instinct is to keep alive the things which give our city its distinct magic: the chance to meet and the life of our streets.
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We don’t want to destroy our city in order to save it. But it is obvious that in the next few weeks — perhaps for the rest of this coming winter — there are going be restrictions, some of them heavier than now.
We will need to limit the number of people outside our household we come into contact with each day, especially indoors and over a long time. Masks and handwashing help. So does social distancing. We can enforce these better. Schools must stay open. Shops should, too.
Not all life will be locked down. But until testing works or a vaccine arrives, new limits on what we can do are unavoidable.